Geared Button Wall
For the past few years we’ve been dealing with buttons. Moving, storing, sorting, picking through, and generally managing a large collection of castaway buttons from a previous company. Some were usable, but many lacked the micro-switch that gives the button any functionality at all. Why do I mention this? Because having these buttons made us [...]
Quick Update about Bob Potts
It seems that my blog has been linked to by one of my favorite sites on the internet: ThisIsColossal.com. I’m just tickled pink. When I first emailed Bob I was just selfishly looking for some inspiration and tips. Since then we’ve been emailing back and forth every few months. I’ve even helped connect him with [...]
A Moveable Feast goes to CicLAvia
Update! A Moveable Feast goes to CicLAvia, April 21, 2013. On Sunday, October 7th, we put the tablecloth on A Moveable Feast, hung the chandelier, and headed out for a nice pedal through the streets of LA for CicLAvia! We set out at 10:30 or so with 6 pedalers. We had no problems crossing the LA [...]
Brass Chaos Pendulum
I recently took some video of a project that I’ve slowly been working on for the past few months. It’s a double pendulum made of solid brass. I wanted to see if using proper bearings would create a nice frictionless chaotic pendulum. I wasn’t disappointed. By tightening the machine screw on the top pivot point [...]
The Fantastic Work of Bob Potts
Recently, while cruising through Youtube, I came across some of the amazing Kinetic Sculptures by Bob Potts. Check them out below:
Taking it to the Streets
With all of the different elements of the Kinetic Sculpture in place it was time to do some laps around the parking lot to see what would break. We’ve literally got lots of moving parts, so it’s important to see what we need to fix. It’s much easier to repair a broken spoke in the [...]
Tidying up the details before Showtime
We had only had 14 days until the Doo Dah Parade, and we had a long way to go, so we stepped things up into high gear. I started working every day and recruited as many helpers each day as possible. I didn’t take time out of my day to blog, as I needed all [...]
Gliding Our Way to the Finish
We’ve been working two or three days a week on this thing. This means we’ve been making a lot of progress, but I haven’t had the time to blog about it much. Let me see if I can catch things up to something remotely current… We finally got started on the driveshaft. We welded it [...]
Suspension and Drivetrain
We cut out a large steel frame for the table top. This will be a weight bearing aspect of the frame, so we used our beefy stuff. We welded up a nice rectangle a few inches smaller than what our table will be and put it on top of our wooden jigs. We just needed [...]
Framing Begins
After hacking up the bicycle frames to distill them into just the parts that we’re going to use, it was time to start welding the basics of the frame together. I purchased 120′ of 1 1/2″ x 1/16″ wall chromoly tubing. Alloy 4130 for those keeping score at home. I’ve also got some 3/4″ tube [...]
